I tried Reeder on the iPhone last year, and I wasn’t immediately in love with it, it’s alright, but I don’t really do too much feed reading on my phone nowadays. Still it’s nice to have an RSS aggregator on my phone, and it’s the one I liked the best. It was $1.99 at the time (it’s $2.99 now) and I was willing to pay that without thinking much about it. It would probably be a better experience on a newer iPhone (I’ve got the 3G) but then, what wouldn’t be a better experience?
I mentioned that I don’t do too much feed reading on my phone nowadays, and that’s true, but I think a large part of it is that I now do a ton of feed reading on the iPad. In fact, on a lazy Sunday morning I’ve been know to spend a good hour or two catching up on my reading just as someone may have read a newspaper in the olden days when they used to print newspapers.
On the iPad I used MobileRSS for a while and like it well enough, except when they redesigned the entire UI during an upgrade. In reading some of the reviews, I kept seeing mentions that it ripped off the design of Reeder. I ended up trying Reeder on the iPad, and while it took me a little while to get used to it, I started to like it. At $4.99 for the iPad version, I grabbed it right away, and I really do love it now. I’d estimate that feed reading on the iPad accounts for more than 50% of what I use the device for.
I normally use Google Reader in Firefox, with some help from Stylish, to make it a bit prettier, but when the Reeder for Mac beta came out, I gave it a shot, and I liked it. I still didn’t do too much reading on desktop (or laptop) as compared to the iPad, but it was nice to have. The user experience is much better than the browser. That said, I was worried it would come out of beta and require a purchase to keep using it. Well, perhaps I wasn’t worried so much as concerned about the unknown price.
Well, Reeder for Mac is out, and it’s $9.99. Now, I know I’m cheap, but I sort of feel like it just isn’t worth it (at least not for me.) I mean, if I weigh how much I use my Mac for feed reading, versus how much I use my iPad for the task, it just doesn’t measure up. If it was $4.99 on the Mac, I’d probably be tempted to grab it. Of course I’ve already spent about $7 for the iPad and iPhone versions, so maybe that’s another reason I’m not ready to kick down another $10 to have another version of it running on yet another device.
Reeder is a really nice feed reader though, and I love it on the iPad at $4.99, but I’m just not convinced it would be worth $9.99 on the Mac. (Again, I’m basing this on my own reading habits.)
